New Monsters by Joshua Rex

Author:Joshua Rex [Rex, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Weird House Press
Published: 2023-01-28T22:00:00+00:00

III

He woke slowly, drawn up and out of his dreams as if from deep water. For a long time he lay there, breathing as if trying to reacclimate to the air. Valentina was not beside him. Henry sat up and shifted his legs around to the side of the bed. He looked down at the red saturated bandages on his legs. He was already tired of changing them. He could not remember the dreams he’d had, but the feelings they’d elicited lingered. His head felt heavy, and his body fatigued as if he’d been exerting himself the last several hours instead of lying in bed.

Valentina was not downstairs. He walked out onto the sagging porch. The fog was the same: an opaque curtain drawn across the ledge upon which the house had crashed. The sound coming up the mountain was much louder now, more rapid, and had a distinct cadence, a lot like a shovel digging a hole: load, unload, repeat.

Henry walked back into the house and through the kitchen toward the backdoor. The scene outside was identical to the previous day, the steps in shambles, the mist like shredded cotton. He started through it up the path, feeling the fog enclose him. He felt everything all at once—sensing, intuiting, understanding. He looked at the mountainside, full of “fossilized” things, a heap of compacted human production. He reached out and touched the greyed blades of a pair of scissors set horizontally into the stone. They crumbled like ash under his fingers. Henry’s eyes narrowed, widened, relaxed. Yes, he was beginning to understand, and he thought that Valentina was too. In fact, he thought that she had understood from the beginning.

He found her on the very edge of the ledge, her arms wrapped around her legs which were drawn up against her chest. Her hair was a long fall of tangled black. She had not changed the bandage on her arm; the blood dripped from her fingers. Like the night before in the parlor, she did not acknowledge his presence there. She was gazing down the mountain, past the house, into the fog from which the sound rose, plainly audible now even from this height. She turned back and looked at him, her fear so palpable, so absolute that it stilled him momentarily, made him hesitate in asking what needed to be asked.

“What is it, Valentina?”

“How should I know?”

“You might not know what it looks like, what’s coming up that mountain. But you know why it’s coming. And where it wants to take you.”

She turned her head, this time looking straight ahead, her teeth clenched and bared slightly as if she were cold. She trembled. The blood dripped. The sound below increased by a decimal. Henry came up beside her and crouched, the ermine edge of his cape dragging in the dust.

“Where are you—really—right now?”

She looked at him, her expression wild with terror. She scampered away so quickly he thought for an instant that she was about to go over the edge.

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